Painting the Numinous: On the Strange Life of Images That Don’t Explain Themselves
Painting as an Ana-Economy of Experience
Martin KinnearWe live in a world saturated with images, and yet the capacity to see—in the older, thicker sense of that word—may never have felt thinner. By “thick,” I mean the kind of seeing that once involved attention, dwelling, and an openness to what exceeds immediate comprehension. Thick seeing is layered: perceptual, affective, material, historical. It belongs to a mode of encounter where the artwork does not simply present itself but addresses the viewer, demanding a reciprocal stance. By contrast, the culture we now inhabit encourages “thin” seeing: quick, surface-level, extractive, and oriented toward instant legibility. Images pass before us too rapidly to be taken seriously; they behave as content rather than experience.
Johnny Golding’s radical materialist ontology helps to clarify this distinction. For Golding, a genuine encounter with an artwork is thick precisely because meaning is co-authored through the dynamic behaviour of matter itself.¹ The painting is not an object to decode but a participant in the encounter. The viewer is not a receiver of information but a co-maker of meaning through affect, sensation, and embodied response. Thin seeing, in Golding’s terms, is the visual correlate of Western metaphysics at its most reductive: the over-codified, representational, “is-this-about-X-or-Y?” orientation that forecloses the event of encounter before it even begins. The shift from thick to thin perception also echoes Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the world as something we are in, not something we stand apart from, and Jean-Luc Marion’s argument that some phenomena saturate perception beyond conceptual grasp.² In all three accounts, thin seeing is not merely impoverished; it is ontologically closed. Thick seeing, by contrast, is a mode of openness—one that is increasingly rare.
Walter Benjamin diagnosed this rarity as early as 1933. Modernity, he said, replaces cumulative, shared, and transmissible experience with discontinuous shock-events.³ The erosion of what he called Erfahrung (deep, narratable experience) into Erlebnis (isolated incidents) means that we no longer meet the world with the depth required for genuine encounter. Nietzsche said something similar, though with more theatricality, when he declared that “God is dead.”⁴ His point was not metaphysical but cultural: the frameworks once capable of holding meaning had collapsed under modernity’s pressures.
That collapse, as Karl Rahner later suggested, is less about divine absence than about perceptual incapacity.⁵ The numinous has not vanished; we have lost the orientation that allows us to perceive it. The thinning of experience is not a failure of art but a crisis in the conditions under which art may be received.
My recent essay, The Numinous Made Visible, pursued precisely this line: the sacred has not departed contemporary life but must now enter through ruptures rather than assurances.⁶ Iconography no longer guarantees presence; instead, the numinous appears—if it appears at all—through material breaks, perceptual gaps, and the moments where representation itself falters. We see this vividly in the charred Canterbury Pietà, blackened by wartime bombing yet made more piercing by the stark contrast of its surviving gold leaf.⁷ The damage does not obscure its devotional force; it intensifies it. The sculpture is numinous not because of what it depicts but because its surface wounds interrupt thin seeing, demanding a thickness of attention that modernity rarely allows.
This interruption is central to Mattia Paganelli’s concept of the “paradoxical economy of crisis.”⁸ Building on Benjamin, Paganelli argues that crisis does not merely destroy meaning but exposes a deeper, unrulier mode of experience—the ana-economy. In the normal “economy” of sense, experience is organised, domesticated, and made exchangeable; images behave. Crisis, however, interrupts this economy, revealing what Paganelli calls the Else: the part of experience that resists assimilation. The Else is not a hidden meaning but an excess—what experience contains but representation cannot fully capture.
Heidegger’s critique of technē and enframing offers another lens.⁹ Under technological rationality, the world appears primarily as resource. A river becomes hydroelectric power; a forest becomes timber; an artwork becomes content. Vision becomes thin because it is pre-formatted: we see for use, for clarity, for explanation. Enframing is a narrowing of ontological possibility—the foreclosure of the Else.
But crisis cracks this enclosure. When our usual interpretive structures fail, a different mode of seeing becomes possible. Benjamin saw it in the shock of modernity; Paganelli sees it in the matériel of collapsed meaning; Golding sees it in the dynamic agency of matter. Thick seeing is, in this sense, not a nostalgic return but a mode of perception only possible when thin seeing fails.
Painting, for me, is the practice of engineering such failures.
I do not mean this melodramatically. I mean that the work must be held in a state where it resists being too easily understood. When I say my paintings “operate through crisis,” I mean they are deliberately kept in a condition of suspended resolution—hovering between recognition and dissolution, suggestion and refusal. Material behaviour is allowed to exceed intention. I scrape back, rework, erase, stain, leave residues, introduce matter that behaves unpredictably. These marks, strata, and interruptions are not effects. They are events. They are the moments where the economy of representation falters and the ana-economy opens.
This is why equivalence—not representation—sits at the centre of my practice.¹⁰ A painting is not a depiction of a thing but an evocation of the feeling of encounter with that thing. It is a material analogue for an experience that cannot be fully pictured. Equivalence is inherently thick; it refuses optical certainty in favour of apprehended resonance. It belongs to the ana-economic field.
Artists have always understood crisis in this way. Turner’s late storms are crises of colour. Constable’s cloud studies are crises of light. Cézanne’s mountains wobble under the strain of perception. Giacometti’s figures flicker at the edge of disappearance. In each case, the image refuses the thin clarity of representational confidence. The refusal is what gives the work life.
Contemporary visual culture, however, rewards the opposite tendency. It prefers images that explain themselves instantly. It trains the viewer to expect thin seeing. Against this culture, a painting that resists immediate comprehension is almost an act of defiance.
The numinous appears in such defiance. Not as a theological assertion but as a perceptual event. It arrives in the gaps—not in what the painting means but in what it withholds; not in what it depicts but in what exceeds depiction. It is what Golding would describe as the “wild” behaviour of matter, the moment where material agency interrupts the representational script.¹¹ It is what Paganelli calls the Else. It is what Benjamin described as the shock of experience that resists narrative capture. It is what Rahner saw as the condition for divine encounter in a secular age.
This is why the Canterbury Pietà remains, for me, such a paradigmatic work. Its surface is a record of both devotion and destruction; its form is simultaneously intact and broken. Thin seeing cannot survive contact with it. The viewer must shift into thickness—into attentiveness, patience, and openness to what exceeds comprehension. The numinous emerges through the wound.
In my own studio, I try to create paintings that act as thresholds rather than windows. A window offers a view. A threshold demands a choice of orientation. When a painting flickers between image and matter, between form and dissolution, it unsettles the thin habits of contemporary seeing. It calls the viewer into an encounter rather than an interpretation. It creates the possibility—never guaranteed—of apprehending the Else.
This, I now realise, is the backbone of my interest in the ana-economy. Thin seeing belongs to the economy: to the ordered, the known, the consumable. Thick seeing belongs to the ana-economy: to the unruly, the excessive, the numinous. The painter’s task, if one can call it that, is not to insert meaning into the work but to keep the work in a state where meaning is not exhausted. Where matter continues to behave. Where the Else remains audible.
In such conditions, painting becomes an alternative economy of experience. It unworks the representational frameworks that modernity has stabilised. It creates small crises—painterly, perceptual, material—in which the thick dimensions of seeing may reappear. It returns us to the older sense of vision: not as consumption, but as encounter. Not as deciphering, but as attention. Not as clarity, but as openness.
If the numinous survives our age, it survives in this thickness. Not in certainties but in interruptions. Not in icons but in wounds. Not in finished meaning but in the strange life of images that don’t explain themselves.
Painting need not save the sacred. But it can make space for the Else. And in a culture devoted to thin seeing, that space may be the closest we come to the numinous.
Notes
Johnny Golding, Radical Matter: Art, Philosophy, and the Wild (Birmingham City University, 2015).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (Routledge, 2012); Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford University Press, 2002).
Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Harvard University Press, 1999).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1974), §125.
Karl Rahner, Faith in a Wintry Season, ed. Raymond Gawronski (Crossroad, 1990).
Martin Kinnear, The Numinous Made Visible: Finding Faith in Modern and Contemporary Art (draft essay, 2025).
Ibid., section on the Canterbury Pietà.
Mattia Paganelli, “The Paradoxical Economy of Crisis: ‘Crisis of Experience’ and the Ana-Economy of Else,” Journal of Popular Narrative Media 3, no. 1 (2012): 60–68.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (Harper, 1993).
Martin Kinnear, Anatomy of Painting (Primer draft, 2025).
Golding, Radical Matter.